In the very first story of his first book, "The Fair of Sorochinetz," we are plunged into an atmosphere that smells of Russia in a way that no other Russian book has ever yet savoured of the soil. We are plunged into the South, on a blazing noonday, when the corn is standing in sheaves and wheat is being sold at the fair; and the fair, with its noise, its smell and its colour, rises before us as vividly as Normandy leaps out of the pages of Maupassant, or Scotland from the pages of Stevenson. And just as Andrew Lang once said that probably only a Scotsman, and a Lowland Scotsman, could know how true to life the characters in _Kidnapped_ were, so it is probable that only a Russian, and indeed a Little Russian, appreciates to the full how true to life are the people, the talk, and the ambient air in the tales of Gogol. And then we at once get that hint of the supernatural which runs like a scarlet thread through all these stories; the rumour that the _Red Jacket_ has been observed in the fair; and the _Red Jacket_, so the gossips say, belongs to a little Devil, who being turned out of Hell as a punishment for some misdemeanour--probably a good intention--established himself in a neighbouring barn, and from home-sickness took to drink, and drank away all his substance; so that he was obliged to pawn his red jacket for a year to a Jew, who sold it before the year was out, whereupon the buyer, recognizing its unholy origin, cut it up into bits and threw it away, after which the Devil appeared in the shape of a pig every year at the fair to find the pieces. It is on this Red Jacket that the story turns. In this first volume, the supernatural plays a predominant part throughout; the stories tell of water-nymphs, the Devil, who steals the moon, witches, magicians, and men who traffic with the Evil One and lose their souls. In the second series, _Mirgorod_, realism comes to the fore in the stories of "The Old-Fashioned Landowners" and "The Quarrel of the Two Ivans." These two stories contain between them the sum and epitome of the whole of one side of Gogol's genius, the realistic side. In the one story, "The Old-Fashioned Landowners," we get the gentle good humour which tells the charming tale of a South Russian Philemon and Baucis, their hospitality and kindliness, and the loneliness of Philemon when Baucis is taken away, told with the art of La Fontaine, and with many touches that remind one of Dickens. The other story, "The Quarrel of the Two Ivans," who are bosom friends and quarrel over nothing, and are, after years, on the verge of making it up when the mere mention of the word "goose" which caused the quarrel sets alight to it once more and irrevocably, is in Gogol's richest farcical vein, with just a touch of melancholy.